"long" and "short" vowels

[Herb Stahlke]

Tom,

Unlike France, Spain, the Arabic-speaking world, and other nations,
English has never had a central authority, like France's L'Académie
française, that takes upon itself the authority to determine what's
"official" in the language.  Standard American English is a loosely
defined construct that represents a loose consensus of a variety of
user populations, and there is disagreement among groups of users as
to what Standard and what is not.

The terms "long" and "short," as used in phonics instruction, roughly
reflect a distinction that was true of English vowels before the onset
of the Great Vowel Shift in the 15th c., or the 13th or 14th depending
on which sources you read.  Here's a link to a brief description of
the Great Vowel Shift:
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/vowels.html.  There's also
a decent Wikipedia article on it.  One of the consequences of the GVS
was that long vowels became diphthongs, as they are in many varieties
of Modern English.

The page you provided a link to gives the IPA representation of the
vowels and consonants of what is called British Received
Pronunciation, not American English.

Herb

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Tom Zurinskas<truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "long" and "short" vowels
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The reason I bring it up is that the "long vowels" as I was taught were the "letter name" vowels for a,e,i,o,u, as in bay, bee, by, beau, boo.  The short vowels are also for a,e,i,o,u, as in hat, get, hit, hot, hut.  I think USA teachers still teach this way.  Is the change as indicated by the site below official for USA English?
>
>
> Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
> see truespel.com
>
>
>> Formulate what you think the terms "long" and "short" vowels are and see the site below to see if you are correct.
>>
>> http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm
>>
>> Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
>> see truespel.com
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